suppressed in his ultimate development.  Evolution is no mechanical tendency making for perfection, according to the ideas current in the year of grace 1897; it is simply the continual adaptation of plastic life, for good or evil, to the circumstances that surround it....  We notice this decay of the animal part around us now, in the loss of teeth and hair, in the dwindling hands and feet of men, in their smaller jaws, and slighter mouths and ears.  Man now does by wit and machinery and verbal agreement what he once did by bodily toil; for once he had to catch his dinner, capture his wife, run away from his enemies, and continually exercise himself, for love of himself, to perform these duties well.  But now all this is changed.  Cabs, trains, trams, render speed unnecessary, the pursuit of food becomes easier; his wife is no longer hunted, but rather, in view of the crowded matrimonial market, seeks him out.  One needs wits now to live, and physical activity is a drug, a snare even; it seeks artificial outlets, and overflows in games.  Athleticism takes up time and cripples a man in his competitive examinations, and in business.  So is your fleshly man handicapped against his subtler brother.  He is unsuccessful in life, does not marry.  The better adapted survive.”

The coming man, then, will clearly have a larger brain, and a slighter body than the present.  But the Professor makes one exception to this.  “The human hand, since it is the teacher and interpreter of the brain, will become constantly more powerful and subtle as the rest of the musculature dwindles.”

Then in the physiology of these children of men, with their expanding brains, their great sensitive hands and diminishing bodies, great changes were necessarily worked.  “We see now,” says the Professor, “in the more intellectual sections of humanity an increasing sensitiveness to stimulants, a growing inability to grapple with such a matter as alcohol, for instance.  No longer can men drink a bottleful of port; some cannot drink tea; it is too exciting for their highly-wrought nervous systems.  The process will go on, and the Sir Wilfrid Lawson of some near generation may find it his duty and pleasure to make the silvery spray of his wisdom tintinnabulate against the tea-tray.  These facts lead naturally to the comprehension of others.  Fresh raw meat was once a dish for a king.  Now refined persons scarcely touch meat unless it is cunningly disguised.  Again, consider the case of turnips; the raw root is now a thing almost uneatable, but once upon a time a turnip must have been a rare and fortunate find, to be torn up with delirious eagerness and devoured in ecstasy.  The time will come when the change will affect all the other fruits of the earth.  Even now, only the young of mankind eat apples raw—­the young always preserving ancestral characteristics after their disappearance in the adult.  Some day even boys will regard apples without emotion.  The boy of the future, one must believe, will gaze on an apple with the same unspeculative languor with which he now regards a flint”—­in the absence of a cat.